


Pure Imagination

by nimmieamee



Series: The Dud [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Kid Fic, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, disregards the tie-in comics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-27
Updated: 2018-11-27
Packaged: 2019-09-01 11:23:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16764178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimmieamee/pseuds/nimmieamee
Summary: Why would I need a pretend friend when I've got you?(scenes from theDud-verse, written ages ago)





	1. Chapter 1

Bucky changed once Steve came along.

Bucky had been an excellent child for nearly ten years. He was handsome. He was only intermittently selfish with his siblings. He’d never once brought his problems home; he seemed to have none. He was the ideal they outlined in all the parenting manuals: he interfered very little with his parents’ lives, demanded little beyond affection, and mostly looked after himself. After crying through the night several times as an infant, he’d soon stopped and behaved himself, which was something little Dotty had never quite caught on about. He’d rarely demanded to be held; that had been Bobby, a very finicky and dependent child. And Bucky had never needed anything more than the most cursory of spankings. Any poor behavior he corrected soon enough, and rarely repeated, unlike Becky, who didn’t care about being punished and was therefore by nature a terror.

Bucky had never been a terror. After meeting Steve, he was still no longer a terror.

But he was changed.

One day he simply brought Steve up and tossed him into conversation at the dinner table – “Ma, if me and Steve saw a man treating people the way that creep George Bancroft was doing in that picture, we would have given him hell.”

And then: “Becky, don’t give me a hard time about this. I get it enough from Steve. You think if I can handle him, I can’t handle you?”

And: “Bobby doesn’t need a new pedal car. Steve hasn’t got one pedal car and he never gives anybody an earful about it like Bobby does. It’s sad, that Steve hasn’t got one pedal car. But Bobby’s not Steve. Bobby could use some sadness.”

And then, increasingly, “Dotty, that’s almost as dumb as something Steve would say!”

Mr. and Mrs. Barnes had never met Steve. And when they asked about where Steve lived, and who his parents were, and which was his church, Bucky was very vague in his answers. He said he spent most of his time after school with Steve. But he never brought his siblings along. Neither Becky nor Bobby nor Dotty could corroborate a single story about Steve. Of the three of them, only Becky seemed to believe Steve existed.

So after a while Bucky’s parents began to assume that Bucky had made Steve up.

It was a great blow. Bucky had never suffered from delusions before. He’d been perfect for nearly a decade. But now he doggedly insisted that his imaginary friend was not only real, Steve was also brave as a lion, while small as a mouse. Steve might appear at any moment, like a stubborn little bad dream, and drag Bucky into all manner of scrapes. Steve was louder than other boys, rougher than other boys, and yet inexplicably frail. Steve sold papers. He sold flowers. He washed dishes sometimes in rathskeller saloons. Steve had broken his arm once and hadn’t even cried. But he had fainted once -- he'd caught a whiff of some factory fumes. Steve knew every nook and cranny in downtown Brooklyn. Steve hadn’t known Calcutta was a place. Steve had encyclopedic knowledge of the Dodgers and could argue about them better than any boy this side of Prospect Park. But he didn’t really talk right sometimes; no one had ever taught him big words. But Steve knew more about medicine than anyone in the world, probably. Though he was failing health class. Steve didn’t live near anybody who owned a car. But if you needed a doctor, Steve could get you one.

They never saw Steve. Bucky never once produced a flesh and blood boy, not even when asked to. Because of course Steve was not flesh and blood.

Mr. and Mrs. Barnes attempted to handle the matter themselves. But over time Steve became an ever more elaborate concoction. After over a year of this, in desperation, Mr. Barnes wrote to a medical professional about it. He and Mrs. Barnes cobbled together more money than they thought they could afford, and they offered it in exchange for discreet assistance in the matter.

“So Steve looked sad today, did he, Bucky?” said the medical professional, when he came by for a blind evaluation. “What made him sad?”

“How should I know? He never tells me,” Bucky complained.

“But don’t you know, Bucky?” said the medical professional, very knowing himself. “If you don’t know what makes Steve sad, who could possibly know? Who on this earth knows more about Steve than you?”

Bucky blinked at him. “Well, his ma. But I guess you’re right. Though…” he broke off, looking annoyed. “There’s all the Navy Yard gang he runs around with sometimes. Joe, and Eddie Vedano, and Arnie Roth…”

He looked down. He’d heard his father’s screeds on the kinds of people you found down by the Navy Yard. But the professional didn’t seem to pick up the mention. Instead he said, as though this were very significant, “So Steve is a gangster?”

“No!” Bucky said hotly. “I mean, maybe in his head. But he’s dumber and nicer than he knows, so—“ He broke off. Fiddled with his slacks. Looked annoyed again. “He’s a good kid. I’m not trying to say he’s a gangster. Don’t go telling people I think that about him." 

“Is he good to you, Bucky, is that why you wouldn’t say he’s a gangster?”

“He’s good to everybody,” said Bucky, as though the professional were very stupid. “That’s why I wouldn’t say he’s a gangster. Anyway, I wouldn’t wanna give him any ideas.”

So the medical professional informed Mr. and Mrs. Barnes that yes, Bucky had probably dreamed Steve up. Steve seemed to come out of bits and pieces of Bucky’s own life spliced with fantasy. Steve lived in a real place, but he had an unlikely little boy crime empire. And so on. So Steve was probably the result of reading the wrong kinds of books, or watching too many pictures. Had they taken Bucky to see a crime film recently? And Mr. Barnes confessed that he had seen George Bancroft’s latest twice. He’d brought Bucky along the second time because Bucky was normally so well behaved.

“It’s not good to dote too much on children,” advised the medical professional.

So Mr. and Mrs. Barnes went to bed very upset with themselves. Becky, however, stood in the doorway of their bedroom and pointed out that the whole Steve business had begun before Bucky had been to see that George Bancroft film. Also that there was a boy named Steve who lived down by the Navy Yard. He was in her friend Norma’s class. But Becky was known to cause trouble. So she was told not to interfere in the affairs of adults and sent to bed with a mug of milk. On the way to bed, she put her face to the door of the boys’ room and whispered loudly that she thought Bucky was just looking for attention.

Bucky poked his head out, nearly upsetting the mug of milk. He said, annoyed, “You know who's a gangster? _You're_ a gangster! Not Steve!”

"I wish I was," Becky said menacingly. "I wish I was, and Steve was too, and Norma and Arnie. But not you, Bucky. Never you."

Then she flounced off to bed, leaving Bucky gaping in the hall, in the wonderful plaid pajamas Mrs. Barnes had bought him for being so honest about whether he thought Bobby ought to have a new pedal car for his birthday.


	2. Chapter 2

Steve would have been very shocked if someone had told him he was imaginary. Imaginary people did not fail health class.

“I wouldn’t be failing,” he told his mother stubbornly, “If they’d just let me take the fitness course.”

It was nighttime. Steve was getting ready to go to bed. His mother was getting ready to go to work. She had a small dresser in her very small room, with a large oval mirror propped on it. She stood before the mirror and pinned up her hair, per Hospital Regulations. Steve sat on the bed in a nightshirt and made faces at the mirror. He always went to bed smeared in menthol and camphor cream to ward away coughs, per Sarah Rogers Regulations. So his nightshirt was sticky and smelly and horrible, and he wanted to take it off.

“I don’t understand,” his mother said, turning around. She raised her brows quizzically and said, “I always give them a letter from Dr. Prescott so you don’t have to take that class. Especially the fitness course.”

Steve couldn’t quite meet her eyes. She had very nice eyes – darker than his; he must’ve gotten his from his dad – but of course she was his mother and so they were totally lost on him. He failed to appreciate them now. He looked at his sticky reflection in the mirror. He said, “Well, I offered to take it this year.”

“You offered.”

“Mmhmm,” Steve said, squirming uncomfortably. Not because of the menthol and camphor cream. 

“What happened to the letter from Dr. Prescott?” said his mother.

“They didn’t look at it,” Steve confirmed. “Because I offered. Because. Every year everybody has to take it, but I don’t have to. That’s not fair. And Bucky took it last year. Said it was fun. He got a prize.”

“Bucky.”

“Yes,” Steve said.

His mother had never met Bucky. Steve often invited Bucky home, of course, but Bucky always begged off and went back to his house. Steve suspected Bucky wasn’t allowed to visit the worst parts of the Navy Yard district anyway. Steve had seen Bucky’s family from a distance – Bucky and his brother and his grey-eyed father driving to work in the Yard, Bucky and his sisters and his beautiful mother singing with a church group on Fulton Street – and they didn’t seem too high-hat or anything. They looked a little frayed around the coat cuffs, and, in Bucky’s pop’s case, around the eyes. But not as frayed as everybody down by the Navy Yard did. So Steve had to assume they wouldn’t have appreciated him dragging Bucky home, and he never made an issue of it. But of course this meant his ma only ever heard about Bucky. She’d never met him. And without meeting Bucky face to face it was probably difficult for her to like Bucky – after all, Steve usually complained about him.

Bucky was very superior and knowing. He’d thought the fitness course would have been bad for Steve’s health, too, and he hadn’t cared about the unfairness. He’d said Steve should accept the unfairness because it ran in Steve’s favor, for once. And Steve had asked him what he meant by that, because it seemed to have been a very high-handed thing to say. But Bucky had only said, “Oh no. You’re not picking a fight with me, pal.” And sat down in the school stairwell and looked coolly at Steve. 

An infuriating challenge that was not a challenge. Bucky didn’t fight unless he wanted to. And he rarely wanted to. Some people lived down by the Navy Yard and had fighting lives and want didn’t come into it; it was just something they _had_ to do. But Bucky lived like he was not one of those people.

“I still don’t understand,” said Steve’s mother now. “If you’re not even in the fitness course, how can you be failing?”

Steve now couldn’t even meet his own eyes in the mirror. He was sure that his reflection looked embarrassingly defeated.

“They put me in health science,” he said. “With Bucky’s class.”

“Health science,” said his mother. “With Bucky.” Her voice sounded very odd. It wasn’t her usual lyrical voice. It was harder and unhappier.

“Yeah,” Steve said. Then, like a confession, “My plan backfired.” And then he sighed, and felt he had to explain.

For health science, Steve had to sit in the library and write an essay. The essay was about the ideal modern American. The teacher had explained that it should be very easy: he only had to find the right science books and copy out the passages that related to his topic. So Steve had found the right science books. They said things like:

_A successful modern man is a fit industrial participant._

This had been easy enough to copy. But as he’d copied it, Steve had begun to wonder what a fit industrial participant was. So he’d kicked Bucky under the table and asked about it.

“It’s not you, that’s for darn sure,” Bucky had said, annoyed at being kicked.

“Why not?” Steve had said.

Bucky had held up a finger. “Your lungs,” he’d said. Then more fingers. “Your heart. Your feet. You’re blind—” 

“Only legally blind,” Steve had stressed. Then the librarian had come by and told them both to be quiet and said she’d expected better from Bucky. Bucky had given Steve a withering look. Steve had felt bad, and had gone back to trying to decipher his book. And learned that Bucky was absolutely right. Bucky usually was. It was one of Bucky’s worst qualities.

Steve would never be a fit industrial participant, not with his body. He couldn’t do any of the things the health science book said he should. He couldn’t lift things or survive dangerous fumes. He didn’t have keen eyesight or perfect radio hearing. He couldn’t even walk past the sugar factory without feeling faint. 

So Steve hadn’t gotten very far with that book. He’d thought – hoped, really – that it was just a one-off, a cuckoo book. But a week later he’d found another.

_The ideal American child will have no deformities. His proportions must have a decent mechanical regularity._

Steve’s proportions, while small, had a decent mechanical regularity. He’d thought so. He’d hoped so, anyway. He’d looked at Bucky, polishing up his essay on the other side of the library table. Bucky’s proportions were nearly perfect. Bucky had once almost won a contest, they were so perfect. So then Steve had decided not to look at Bucky – that was just setting himself up for unfair competition, and anyway it was wrong to use a friend like that. Instead Steve had looked at his hands. He’d thought they were good hands. Normal. About identical. Not deformed. Though his feet weren’t great, and neither was his back. But deformed?

Bill Shanahan was always telling Steve he was deformed. And Mr. Dwyer from down the street, who frequented the local saloons and could be a mean drunk, had alluded to it a couple times. But Sarah had always told him not to listen to people like that. So this book, too, Steve set aside, in favor of another one.

_To survive, a man must be sturdy and strong._

Oh.

Then, a week later:

_Truly great men generally come in powerful sizes, with hearts like great engines and internal pneumatics that rarely falter. These men not only live. They operate beautifully._

Steve did not operate beautifully. In fact, he thought, furrowing his brow and squirming in front of the mirror, bringing his hands along his back to trace the very bottom of his small and irregular spine, sometimes he didn’t operate at all. Just yesterday he’d had another asthma attack. A month ago he’d come down with a bad infection. He stopped tracing his spine. Now he pressed along his ribs. They were pretty good ribs. It was the lungs that were the real problem. He imagined his lungs were two rude men, hanging out down by the subway entrance on Myrtle, refusing to cooperate with his body’s demands. His lungs were two crooks. He wished he could reach in and slap them around, get them to fall in line. He imagined the whole scene like something out of a movie.

“Steve,” his mother said. She had turned around. She seemed to have forgotten about her hair. It fell around her face, disordered. A rubber curler dangled behind her left ear.

“I just don’t wanna write it,” Steve admitted. “Bucky finished his already, said he’d help. But I don’t wanna sign my name to it. He said they’d tell you sooner or later, so—“

Bucky was very smart, Steve figured. Because Bucky had quickly realized that the one way to rattle Steve and maybe get him to write the essay was to mention that Ma might be upset.

“—so I just told you myself,” he finished. “Anyway. I’m sorry.”

And then, because he didn’t know where to look, he looked at his hands. They were skinny. But they were pretty good body parts, he thought. They worked. He could draw with them. They were good for something, unlike the rest of him.

He did not want to copy down on paper how very unfit he was, like that was the right answer. Though a small part of him briefly considered that maybe it was right.

“Do you think I should write the essay?” he asked his mother, after a minute. This would decide it. Only he figured it was only polite to look at her when he asked an important question like that, and then he wished he hadn’t. His mother looked all wrong, not like herself at all, like something had spooked her. “Bucky wrote his.”

“Bucky’s not you,” his mother said, low and unhappy. “You know that, don’t you, Steve?”

For some reason, maybe because it was time for bed and Steve was tired and upset, this was funny to him.

“Of course,” he said, laughing. “He’s nothing like me. Good thing, I guess.”

Bucky was very healthy, and even if he could be superior he was kind in his own way, and he always had pocket money. He didn’t have to work, and he won fitness prizes and contests. He was very sturdy and strong for his age. Teachers always expected better from him. He was loyal, and he helped Steve whenever he could. He operated beautifully. Steve had of course told his mother all of this over the past year. He was proud of Bucky, and to be friends with someone like Bucky seemed to him an extraordinary piece of good luck. But hearing that never seemed to make Steve’s mother happy. And so now she did not seem to like hearing Steve affirm, yet again, how wonderful Bucky was.

She said, after a minute, very firmly: “Don’t write the essay. I’ll handle this. Just—just don’t write it.”

And then she didn’t say he had to come straight home after work, or that he couldn’t go down by Ebbets Field, or any of the usual punishments he got when he did something harebrained like asking to be in the fitness course. She just tucked him into bed and told him to cover his chest. She sat looking at him for a bit even though she had to go to work soon. She didn’t get up until all his limbs felt heavy, and he was nearly asleep, hazy and comfortable and breathing even for once.

He thought he heard her step outside the room. He imagined she was opening the front door at one point. He thought he heard a neighbor’s voice – Mrs. Petrelli, maybe – saying she would keep an ear out for Steve. Then asking something.

And in response his mother said something about sickness, something about making up imaginary selves, inventing lucky little boys. Something about fantastic second lives. A kind of make believe where Steve didn’t hurt all the time and could take the fitness course and wasn’t so unhappy.


	3. Chapter 3

When Bucky finished his essay early he turned it in and Mrs. Deckert graded it right there. She said that Bucky would win the prize again this year, and that he _had_ to tell his parents. So he did. The prize wasn’t anything special, though. Last year it had been a red bicycle horn. This year it was a chance to go to a months-long lecture series at a big hall near Astor Place. Bucky had never wanted or asked for such a chance. But he got it. And, because he’d won the prize early, Mrs. Deckert insisted he go to the very next lecture and every lecture after that, because people were going to be so excited to meet him. 

His mother made him go. The lectures were dull; he processed little. And every time he had to go he got a nametag pinned to his chest. It always said: James Barnes, Public School 222, Grade 5, Award Winner. His mother also received a nametag. On it she would write that she was the proud mother of James Barnes, Award Winner. It filled Bucky with inexplicable humiliation. He felt like a racehorse.

The one consolation was that by the third or fourth lecture Becky also had to come along. Bobby couldn’t be made to suffer through the lectures. He was going to be in an Easter play about redemption through Christ bringing about the end of winter. He was rehearsing the role of a small inquisitive bunny rabbit. And Dotty never had to suffer through the lectures, either. She had a godmother who’d always take her on weekends to see things like the Statue of Liberty and Rye, New York, and the Hammer Industries Refrigerator Exhibition in Madison Square. But Becky never had anything to do, and so she had to suffer just as Bucky did, which was fine by Bucky. 

Becky, too, was nametagged. Her nametags came blank, however, because there was nothing award-winning about her. On them she would write things like: MARY PIKFERD, SCREENE STAR, DOES NOT NOE JAMES BARNES. Even though she did not look a thing like Mary Pickford, and she would have benefitted from getting to know James Barnes a little better, since Bucky was an excellent speller and a credit to the family, and she was a spelling-challenged aggravation. 

Bucky was annoyed with Becky.

For almost a month now, she’d stood outside his door kept making noises about this whole business with Steve. So one time he'd poked his head out and said, perfectly honestly, “It’s not my fault they think Steve’s made up! I told them he’s not.”

“Oh, fine,” Becky had sniffed. “Steve who _maybe_ lives by the Navy Yard, who _maybe_ was in the hospital four times, who _maybe_ thinks he’s tough, who’s _maybe_ Catholic, who _maybe_ starts fights—“

“Maybe he does,” Bucky had said evasively. These were all of course the things he dreaded coming clean about completely. His parents might have hated Steve if they’d known about any of them. 

He didn’t want to lie. He wanted very badly for his parents to like Steve, and he wanted them to know about Steve. But it seemed to him that if his parents knew too much about Steve, they might not like Steve at all. He suspected that his parents would disapprove if they ever saw Steve: tiny Steve with his runny nose, and his ugly overlarge coat, and his cheap shoes, and his asthma, and his sometime-squint, and his rotating collection of bruises. Plenty of people – normal people, not especially cruel people – looked at Steve and saw nothing to approve of: a faulty model. And if his parents did, too, then probably they wouldn’t see any point to his knowing Steve anymore. 

Bucky didn’t want it to come to that.

But Becky didn’t know this. So she’d said, “ _Maybe_ Steve deserves a better friend than _you_!” 

And then she had flounced off to bed, leaving Bucky gaping in the hall, and now, a week later, Bucky was still angry with her. He didn’t think he was a bad friend to Steve. He tried not to be, anyway. He hardly ever lied to Steve. When Steve asked for Bucky’s opinion, Bucky gave it to him straight. But if he had to lie _for_ Steve, he always did. If someone wanted to know whether it had been Steve who gave his school milk to the bums who collected outside the PS 222 steps (yes), or whether Steve had let a stray dog come into the gym out of the rain (yes), or whether Steve was the boy who’d started last week’s fight in the lunchroom when Lou had been rude about Arlo’s father (yes), then Bucky always said no. He never came clean then. 

But he hadn’t come clean about Steve to his parents either. And his omissions had doubtlessly confused them, and they’d had Bucky secretly evaluated. And now he couldn’t go the movies anymore. Instead he spent his weekends at the lecture hall. 

In hindsight, he could see that this had not been the best plan.

The lecture hall was vast but stuffy. It had few windows. Where the windows ought to have been, there were instead stone panels with carvings of men doing powerful things like holding hammers, carrying rocks on their backs with their faces lit by the rays of the sun, or else standing on chains. They all looked about identical, with shapeless faces and bulging arms and bulging thighs and bulging chins. Only one wore a shirt. It was unbuttoned, which made sense because a little scrap of shirt like that couldn’t possibly fit on all his bulges. Beneath him there was an inscription: _Herakles Seeks His Freedom_.

Herakles ought to use his freedom to buy a shirt that fit, Bucky thought. And after a minute of staring at Herakles and Herakles’ brothers, he began to feel that there was something grotesque about them. He couldn’t explain why. There just was. Nothing about them seemed remotely alive or human. In fact they looked like they’d been mass-produced, churned out by a machine somewhere. So he looked away and his eyes landed on Becky, sitting on the other side of their mother.

Their mother was listening to the lecture, rapt. Becky was not. She was fiddling with her nametag. She had somehow collected many nametags and pinned them to their mother’s coat sleeve without being detected. Now she appeared to be contemplating whether to swap out Mary Pickford for another identity, possibly a more believable one. Bucky thought this would be a sound maneuver. He snapped his fingers soundlessly to get Becky’s attention. Then, when Becky looked up, he mouthed, “Mary Pickford? Really? With _your_ chin?”

And she mouthed, “I hate you.”

Then their mother and all the other people started clapping at something the speaker had said. Bucky turned away from Becky and clapped too, because it seemed appropriate. When he looked back, Becky had a new nametag.

It said: STEEV ROJER, JAMES BARN’S IMAJNARRY FREND???

Bucky was affronted. Steve didn’t deserve that kind of treatment. Neither did he. After a minute of examining his mother to make sure she was well and truly wrapped up in the lecture, he carefully reached around her back to where her coat was, and began unpinning one of the extra nametags. Becky helped. He pointed at their mother’s purse, because he needed a pen, too. Becky made a face, but got the pen. Then Bucky brought his arm back around and wrote on the new nametag, underlining to show the corrections:

Steve Rog ers, James Barnes’ imaginary friend

Becky squinted at it. She took off her old nametag and waved it at him behind their mother’s back. Bucky exchanged it for the new one. The man sitting behind their mother coughed, but Bucky only looked at him serenely. And after a minute, for lack of anywhere else to put the misspelled nametag, Bucky pinned it to his mother’s scarf, which she’d placed on the chair arm nearest him. Then he forgot about it momentarily because Becky was making exaggerated bored child gestures at the man sitting behind them, and Bucky had to calm her down before she upset someone, or worse, that someone alerted their mother.

Unfortunately, the nametag resurfaced when it was time to go. Bucky and Becky and their mother had taken lemonade in the lobby after the lecture, when all the rapt adults were milling about and talking. Becky soon indicated that she would be doing something supremely naughty if no one let her leave, because she had been bored throughout the lecture and couldn’t possibly be expected to suffer any more than that. 

“Rebecca,” said their mother warningly. But then she wound her scarf around her neck. She preferred to give in, not to fight. A few years with the extremely easygoing Bucky had left Mrs. Barnes completely defenseless against Rebecca. She’d had no practice raising difficult children. So she tended to just let Becky have her way.

But at this point a tall man with spectacles came up. It was the man who’d been sitting behind them. He had also been admiring Bucky’s mother across the lemonade table, because Bucky’s mother was good-looking – she looked like Bucky – and the bespectacled man was a creep, probably.

“You have beautiful, playful children,” he said, gesturing at Mrs. Barnes’ new nametag. And Bucky’s mother looked down at her scarf and saw it there – STEEV ROJERS – and said, “ _Rebecca_ ,” in a horrible voice.

Becky faithlessly took Bucky down with her. She pointed at her new nametag, which was clearly written in Bucky’s far nicer hand. Steve Rogers. Bucky’s mother shot Bucky a betrayed look. Bucky immediately thought of all the pictures he would never, ever get to see, not for the next ten years, probably.

But the bespectacled man only laughed. He said, “Now who is Steve Rogers?”

Bucky’s mother looked like she wanted the lecture hall walls to collapse around them, like she would have been fine with being buried underneath the bulging stone torso of _Milo of Croton Saves Mathematics_. She said, “He’s just a kind of make-believe—“

“Oh no,” Becky said, very seriously. “He’s real. He’s a Catholic and he lives by the Navy Yard and starts fights all the time—”

All the things Bucky’s mother could never know, or she would decide that Steve was not only real: he was also not acceptable. “You’ve got no proof of that!” Bucky protested.

“—and he gets sick sometimes, too,” Becky said. “He’s famous, almost. For two things. Starting fights. And getting sick. He’d always almost dying in _some_ way. He’s nuts.”

“He’s _not_ ,” Bucky insisted.

“But when he’s in the hospital,” Becky continued, “The crazy one is Bucky, because he comes home and depresses everybody. The way he goes on about Steve.”

It was true that sometimes Steve was gone for weeks. He didn’t come to school and Eddie Vedano said he wasn’t allowed out of bed. Or he didn’t show up to sell papers and people said he was stuck in the hospital. And in those moments Bucky went—well. Not crazy. But he did get maybe a little contrary. And he did start to stare people down in the lunchroom, and offer a hello to the nicer bums, and once he’d even let a kitten into Mr. Dreyer’s store because it had looked wet and miserable.

Somehow, when Steve was inside the hospital, Bucky began to think more about what Steve would do if he were there. And in that way the mantle of being the craziest kid in Brooklyn would fall to Bucky. 

“Steve doesn’t even go to the hospital all that often,” was all Bucky said now, shooting a nervous look at his mother. He’d never told his mother about Steve’s hospital visits.

“He goes all the time,” Becky said. “He’s always sick and getting sicker. I don’t think there’s a single sickness in the world that hasn’t almost killed him.”

“He’s never let any sickness kill him!” Bucky said.

“He is _imaginary_ ,” said Bucky’s mother.

The bespectacled man was now looking at all the nametags. He was enjoying himself immensely. He said, “Is James Barnes imaginary, too?”

“I wish,” Becky said. 

In response, Bucky’s mother began to look like she wished all her children were imaginary. And she haltingly started to excuse them. But the bespectacled man only crouched down in front of Becky and said, “It’s a good thing you brought Steve along with you today. Why, with everything we heard about staying healthy, Steve’ll shape up in no time.”

Becky blinked. She hadn’t heard anything about staying healthy. Neither had Bucky. He had not been listening. And anyway Steve didn’t work like that. Some people were unhealthy and then they got better. But Steve wasn’t really one of those people. Becky evidently thought the same. Because she could never shut her mouth, and so she said as much.

“Ah,” said the bespectacled man. And then, winking at Bucky’s mother, he said, “Well, perhaps you shouldn’t take Steve anywhere, then. Maybe Steve belongs in a hospital. My advice? Take Steve to Bellevue and leave him there, my dear.”

Bucky stared at him. He didn’t like that thought at all. And he knew the man thought Steve was imaginary, but it still rankled to hear that, so he said, “Nobody asked for your advice.”

“ _Bucky_ ,” said his mother. And she smiled at the man and added, “That’s very good advice. Steve probably belongs in the hospital.”

“If he’s all that sick,” continued the man, putting a hand on Bucky’s shoulder, and a hand on Becky’s. “The world probably has nothing to offer him, don’t you think? Only polio, botulism, influenza, sleeping sickness, coronary assaults. In other words, it has a lot to offer. None of which it sounds like Steve can stand.”

“And, as we heard today in the lecture,” said their mother, because she was still apparently under the impression that Bucky and Becky had listened to the lecture, “Someone like Steve has nothing to offer the world.”

“That’s not true!” Bucky protested. He looked pleadingly at Becky for support. Becky said, “Steve’s not so bad, “ and shrugged a little helplessly.

“Ah! But you said he’s always sick,” said the man, in an infuriating knowing way. “And that’s not someone you should drag around with you. A pretty girl like you should find a vigorous man, a survivor.” And when Bucky opened his mouth, clearly incensed because Steve _was_ a survivor, the man held up a hand and continued. “Now, I’m sure Steve isn’t a special danger, not really. And perhaps his mental issues are limited to his bouts of insanity.”

“Asthma, too,” Becky piped up.

“You shut up,” Bucky said furiously.

He thought his mother started to say something disapproving. But the man cleared his throat and she died away. The man said, “Either way. Maybe there’s a possibility that genetically Steve carries no degrading element. Maybe he won’t contaminate anyone, pass on anything bad. Maybe sterilization isn’t _required_ in this case.”

“If only. The legislature’s never considered anything like Steve,” muttered Bucky’s mother.

“Ah, but maybe we should sterilize him anyway,” said the man, with a twinkle in his eye. “Keep him from multiplying, becoming bigger. Passing his sickness around to all you nice, otherwise-healthy children.”

“Yes,” Bucky’s mother said fervently. “Let’s.”

And even though Bucky was shaking his head, he didn’t know how to explain that that was a real person they were talking about, not an imaginary boy they could just wish away. So the man took no notice of him at all. He only smiled broadly at Bucky’s mother, and pulled a penny out of Becky’s ear, and said, “Well. I hope that solves the issue of Steve.” Then he doffed an imaginary cap, and bid them all good day. And Mrs. Barnes was charmed.

Bucky was not. 

“Steve can have my penny,” Becky said. She looked contrite.

“ _Rebecca_ ,” said their mother, suddenly discovering all the screen star nametags on her coat sleeve. “Enough of that. Steve is gone. We’ve sterilized.”

“Anyway Steve wouldn’t want your stupid penny,” Bucky said, in a rage.


	4. Chapter 4

It took some time for his mother to get a second letter from Dr. Prescott since the doctor was very busy: he handled the whole children’s ward. And anyway now the school wanted all kinds of extra information, such as health records and a psychological evaluation. So Steve went all the way to the hospital where his mother worked and sat in a paneled office and answered all kinds of questions. Some were about the essay. But some, usually the ones prompted by his mother, were about Bucky.

What was Bucky like?

Good. A pain.

What made Bucky a pain?

Oh, sometimes Steve had to fight or something. And Bucky was always there saying, “No, you don’t _have_ to fight.”

So was Bucky like a conscience?

No. You couldn’t expect anybody to be your conscience for you. You had to do that yourself. 

But wasn’t Bucky a little like Steve sometimes?

No. Bucky was nothing like him. Bucky’s pop had a car. And Bucky had a _pop_. And he’d never failed a thing in his life. And he was easy about everything. He never got nervous or riled up. He never got sick.

“Why did you have to ask about Bucky anyway?” Steve asked suspiciously. By now he suspected that his mother just didn’t like Bucky. And he wondered if he wasn’t saying the right things, if he had given her the wrong impression. She thought Bucky was terrible, obviously, but he wasn’t. 

Bucky ought to have been the kind of kid that looked down on Steve. Boys like Bucky usually did. But instead Bucky had jumped into a fight and defended Steve one day, and ever since that day Bucky had never been anything but good to Steve. To have turned his mother against Bucky seemed like the worst kind of payback, and Steve wasn’t sure how to fix it.

“Well,” Sarah said, after a minute. She broke off. She sounded worn. She looked worn. She had worked all night and come home in the early hours of the morning when Steve was out selling papers. But instead of going to bed she’d finally fixed the ripped hem on her green church dress, her best dress, and then she’d changed into it and walked to Fulton Street to meet Steve. She was going to school with him today to resolve the matter of the health essay.

Steve didn’t want to press her. But he did want to know why she didn’t like Bucky. So he asked.

“I suppose I don’t like him because—“ Sarah said. “Because—because why do you _need_ him, Steve?”

“He’s my friend,” Steve said, taken aback. He almost tripped on the street because he wasn’t watching where he was going, and his mother noted that one of his shoelaces was untied. She pulled him over to a stoop and sat him down so she could fix it. Steve could tie his own shoes, but he didn’t complain, because she liked to do things for him, and in fact she was the only person in the world who was allowed to. He examined his hands while she tied his shoes. He’d felt very very cold this morning and his mother had given him gloves, but he was fast developing a kind of obsession with his hands, because he liked them so much. His neck – now that was itchy today. So was his forehead. And his joints ached, and his throat was sore. But when he pulled off the gloves his hands still looked fine. Completely normal.

“You have friends,” Sarah said, when she was done. “What happened to Joe, and Eddie, and Arnie?”

“Nothing,” Steve said. “They’re all still there.”

His mother sighed. She pulled him up off the stoop and adjusted his coat. Then, because his voice had come out hoarse just then, she wound her scarf around his scarf. “Let’s go to school,” she said.

So they did. Steve was supposed to go to class when he got there. But he never got to spend time with his mother – she was always working. She worked at Bellevue in Manhattan, because there the pay was better than it was in Brooklyn, and so she was far away most of the time. And Steve usually put it out of his mind and didn’t mind it, except now that she was in front of him he couldn’t help but think of it. When he was awake, his mother was asleep. When he was asleep in Brooklyn, his mother was awake in Manhattan. He was filled with a painful kind of happiness because he got to be with her here, now, even if it was only because he was failing health class.

So instead of going to his spelling class, which he wasn’t very good at anyway, he took his mother around the office and introduced her to all the secretaries. He showed her the yard from the window, and the big police station just beyond, and the mail slots for the teachers, and the water fountain that spat water out a little crooked. The secretaries all said he looked like her. Steve figured this was true. When he looked up at her he could see that they had the same narrow face. And they were both small, and they had the same mouth and eyebrows, but on his mother the mouth looked nice instead of funny, and she always fixed her eyebrows because a woman, she said, was not allowed to go around looking like some kind of vaudeville comedian. Mr. Finney came in and said Steve had a wonderful mother and that Sarah had a hardworking son; this made them both happy. His mother smiled with one side of her mouth. Steve could do that, too, so he did. He held his mother’s hand the whole time. His good, healthy hand in her good, healthy hand. He’d taken off his glove and could feel the warmth of her hand, and even though he was still itchy and tired and sore, it felt good.

He was showing his mother how to remove the canister on the pencil sharpener to access the shavings inside when the door to the teachers’ office opened. Bucky was there. Mrs. Deckert, the health teacher, was just behind him. She was a woman with a beautifully suntanned collarbone who often wore a YWCA pin on her breast. She always sniffed, like Steve did. But Steve sniffed because of poor health. Mrs. Deckert sniffed because she seemed to think that by sniffing she might hit on secret reserves of fresh country air in the middle of Brooklyn. She sniffed now. She said, “That’s ridiculous. There’s no reason to revoke your prize. Anyway I think you still obviously have something to learn.”

Bucky looked mutinous. This was not a common look on Bucky – usually Bucky was easygoing and calm. All thoughts of the health essay fled Steve’s mind. He poked his head around his mother’s side and mouthed, “What’s the matter?”

But when Sarah went in to speak to Mrs. Deckert, Bucky only said, “Shouldn’t you be in spelling?”

“You don’t want your prize?” was what Steve said. This seemed like a more interesting topic of conversation than spelling.

Bucky scowled. He _never_ scowled outright. He looked annoyed very often, and sometimes lofty, and at other times plainly aggravated. But he was not by nature a scowler. For Bucky to scowl, there had to be something very wrong happening.

A certain idea had been sitting in the back of Steve’s mind for the past few minutes. He’d begun to think that this moment, right now, with his mother here and Bucky here, would be the perfect moment to convince his mother that Bucky was alright. _He_ couldn’t do it. He’d tried everything. He’d dressed his talk up a little –not lied, because he wasn’t a good liar, but tried to explain Bucky to his mother the same way he’d explained Bucky to Mrs. Dreyer down on Fulton. Talked about how Bucky was a true and free American youth, a credit to the city, a real high-brow and above-board type. But unfortunately his mother was not Mrs. Dreyer. She’d been completely unaffected. Steve’s best sales pitch had slid right off her, and only made her look unhappy.

So he’d been thinking, from the minute he saw Bucky here, that the best person to speak for Bucky was Bucky. His mother couldn’t possibly hate Bucky with Bucky in front of her. Bucky seemed intimidating from far away. But in person he was so plainly good that Steve couldn’t understand how anyone could refuse him. All Steve had to do, really, was keep Bucky here, and then when his mother came out Steve would introduce them, and she would see Bucky as Steve saw him. Bucky in a smart blue jacket, with his hair very neat and his fingernails clean: the prize-winning boy.

And she would very quickly take to him. This was the plan.

But in the face of Bucky’s obvious upset the plan seemed beside the point. Steve forgot the plan as easily as he’d forgotten forgot about the essay. And then he even forgot about how much his face and neck itched and his throat hurt. He pulled himself up on one of the hard wood chairs next to the window, to show Bucky that he wasn’t planning on leaving anytime soon, and he swung his feet nervously above the floor, and he said, “What’s wrong with the prize?”

Bucky said, “Nothing. I just don’t want it,” in a way that was very convincing. But Steve was not convinced.

He guessed that maybe this year Bucky hadn’t gotten another bicycle horn.

“You might as well tell me. I’m never gonna see it anyway,” he pointed out to Bucky. Steve was just not prize-winning. 

Bucky said flatly, “You wouldn’t be missing much.”

Then, apropos of nothing, he craned his neck and looked at the hardwood floor beneath the pencil sharpener. Steve couldn’t see anything there, but Bucky bent down and seemed to pick something up, and when he had straightened he produced a penny. 

“You dropped this,” he told Steve.

“No I didn’t,” Steve said, confused. He’d given all his earnings to his mother just last night. “Where did you get that?”

“The floor,” Bucky said, as though this were the most obvious thing in the world. 

Steve stared again at the bare floor.

“ _I’m_ not blind,” Bucky reminded him. “You must’ve dropped it.” And when Steve clearly didn’t buy it, he added, “Or your ma did.” This did seem more likely. Steve allowed it, and let Bucky press the penny on him. But this exchange couldn’t erase his worry over Bucky’s odd behavior. Obviously Bucky preferred not to talk about it, though. Steve bit his lip and tried to think of what to do in a case like this. Usually Bucky was perfectly forthright, he thought. 

It occurred to him that usually he assumed Bucky had few problems. Nothing seemed really _wrong_ with Bucky, ever, and now that he had some unknown issue Steve didn’t know how to handle it. 

“Are you alright, Buck?” Steve asked, looking at Bucky sideways.

“Yeah,” Bucky said, after a minute.

This was backwards – it was often Bucky asking _him_ , and often him brushing off _Bucky’s_ worry. And, Steve thought, bringing a fingernail to his mouth and chewing on it anxiously, half the time Bucky was asking about things he didn’t need to worry about, getting loftily concerned where even regular concern was unnecessary, brushing off Steve’s brush-offs and insisting Steve come clean about his problems, so that Bucky could help solve them. Steve knew that it was kind of Bucky to care. But it could get overwhelming. Sometimes he wished Bucky cared a little less.

Maybe pretending to find pennies (really finding pennies?) and other distractions, maybe that was just how Bucky dealt with his problems. Steve decided to respect that.

They sat in companionable silence. For a half-second. Then Bucky produced a small strip of paper and folded it in a complex way, until it formed a kind of stiff arrowhead. He did this a few more times with a few more strips. Then he knelt near the edge of the empty chair nearest Steve, with a wary glance at the secretaries. He parceled out his arrowheads evenly between the two of them, and then showed Steve how to position the arrowheads on one edge of the chair and flick them with such force that they cleared four or five chairs in a line. Steve caught on quickly enough. It was a hand game, and his hands were pretty good. 

They added a few alterations here and there, launching arrowheads in complex formations. Bucky was by far the better player in this modified game; his fingers were stronger, and his eyes were better. But Steve was more inventive, and hit on how to make it a points system by clearing the wastepaper basket, the pencil sharpener. 

At one point they laughed a little too loud. One of the secretaries caught on and stopped typing. She peered around the side of her cubicle at them. Steve flushed red. Bucky looked cool and innocent. The secretary raised an eyebrow, but with a glance at Sarah Rogers silhouetted behind the frosted glass door of the teachers’ office she let them alone.

Steve glanced at the door, too. His mother’s hazy form was saying something. Very passionately, probably. Since she kept shaking her head. But he couldn’t hear it. Until suddenly he could.

“The doctors say it’s all a kind of delusion,” she was saying, her voice going strong, her old accent leaking through at points. “This whole other little boy he can pretend to be! If you’d just read the letter—”

“I can’t say I’m surprised he has an imaginary friend,” Mrs. Deckert replied frankly, aggravatedly. “But I had no way of knowing this would happen when I enrolled him, and the most you can accuse me of is thinking that maybe Steve was smarter than he looks.”

“Yes, that was very kind of you,” Sarah Rogers snapped. “I’m sorry we can’t say the same of you!”

Then their words became hard to hear again, and Steve looked first at Bucky, whose eyebrows were climbing up to meet his hairline, then back at the frosted glass door. After a minute his mother came out, lips drawn tight. She let the door slam behind her, then glanced at a startled secretary and apologized. But when she reached Steve there was no apology in her tone. Only curt anger.

She got this way sometimes. When she ran into certain doctors, the ones who weren’t Dr. Prescott, the ones she said weren’t worth their degrees. Sometimes when Steve was in the hospital they would come to take a look at him, and they would talk about all the various ways he was wrong, all the parts of him that didn’t work, like he wasn’t even a person. But they’d leave in a hurry when Dr. Prescott or his mother came back, because Dr. Prescott and Sarah Rogers had an understanding, and the understanding was that nobody was gonna make Steve feel bad while pretending they were doing it to treat him.

“She says I have to take it up with the School Board,” his mother said now, plainly furious. “To fix _her_ mistake. Well, I will. We have the letters from Dr. Prescott, and we have—“ she broke off, stared at Steve, tilted his head back gently and ran a finger along the side of his face. “—are you red?” she asked worriedly. “You look red.”

He did itch there. But he didn’t want her to worry and anyway something she had said caught up with him. So he said, “I’m fine.” Then, in a higher, more confused tone, “Did you tell her I have an imaginary friend?”

He couldn’t understand why his mother would say that to anyone. Not even to get him out of having to write the health essay. It was a lie. It was a kind of pretend Steve had never had to engage in. There were plenty of boys around the neighborhood – boys she liked, even, like Eddie and Arnie and Joe. So Steve didn’t need to make one up.

His mother closed her eyes and suddenly looked very tired. She said, “Steve, it’s time to stop.”

And Steve protested that he wasn’t doing anything he should have to stop. And it only made her look sadder. They fell to arguing, which was something Steve _hated_ doing with her. He immediately felt so lightheaded and sick over it that he completely forgot about Bucky, standing right there and watching the whole thing, until Mr. Finney came back in and said, “Bucky Barnes! You don’t have a mother here. Get back to history class right now, or you’ll be washing the blacktop.”

Steve was mid-sentence, putting forward that there was nothing wrong with him in his brain, he wasn’t sad, he didn’t need to invent a whole new life for himself; his life with her was good enough. He paused only briefly, to shoot Bucky an apologetic look as Mr. Finney berated him for the many paper arrowheads scattered all over this corner of the office.

But Sarah said blankly, “Bucky Barnes? _Bucky_?”

“Yes?” Bucky said nervously.

“He’s my friend,” Steve said, pointing one thin arm at Bucky. “Talk about him all the time, even. Why would I need a pretend friend if I’ve got him?”

Sarah's reply was slow and a little shocked.

"So...so there's nothing wrong with you?"

This was not strictly true. Something was always wrong with Steve, and he figured it was only fair to say so (so did Mrs. Deckert), but Bucky shot him down before he could get a word in edgewise.

"Why would something be wrong with him?" he asked, too-defensive.

Steve could have told him that was the wrong tack to take. His mother _liked_ boys who got all bothered and tough for the sadsacks of the world, since she had a sadsack for a son, and so instead of feeling corrected Sarah just beamed and beamed, happier than she'd been in weeks.

Steve could have told her that she would like Bucky if she'd just given him half a chance. Bucky had that effect on people.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this a while ago and wasn’t wild about it then, but it reads okay now. Hope you liked it! I have a few more Dud-verse bits in a drawer that I may post someday, assuming I ever feel like polishing them up (a big assumption).


End file.
